Most agencies sell the boost. We build the baseline that makes the boost possible.

The story

Most of the Baseline team came from the same place: a home services SEO agency that shipped one product, and shipped it well. The product was simple in concept — turn every completed job into proof. Geo-tagged photos from real job sites, wrapped in schema, distributed automatically across the most relevant pages on a contractor's website. Repeated thousands of times, it became some of the most powerful local SEO content on the internet.

But the product had a prerequisite. It only worked if the website it ran on was already built right. Clean schema. Real service pages. Real location pages. A foundation Google could read and trust. Without that, the check-ins had nowhere to land — they were proof of work for a business Google didn't fully understand yet.

That prerequisite — the baseline — is where the agency we came from stopped paying attention. Because building a foundation is unglamorous, low-margin work. The product was the headline. So the company kept raising minimum contract sizes, kept narrowing toward private-equity-backed roll-ups who already had decent sites, and kept walking away from the independent contractors who needed the foundation in the first place.

Meanwhile, those PE-backed operators were using endless ad budgets and corporate-grade SEO to slowly take the local search results away from the family-owned plumbers and HVAC techs who'd been serving their towns for decades. The little guy was being priced out of being found.

So a group of us left.

What Baseline does

Baseline exists to do the unglamorous part well, and to do it for the operators who got left behind. The website itself. Built right from the start. The schema, the service pages, the city pages, the technical foundation that lets every other piece of marketing — including job-site check-ins, GBP posts, Local Service Ads, content — actually compound on top of it.

That's the whole thesis: Google rewards businesses that give it what it wants to see. A clearly defined business, in clearly defined service areas, doing clearly defined work, with verifiable proof. AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's own AI Overviews — rank on the same signals. They pull from sites that are structured, locatable, and trustworthy. That's the foundation we build. That's what makes everything that comes after — the content, the check-ins, the ads — actually work.

Our take is that Google wants the little guy to win. The whole point of the local algorithm is to surface businesses that genuinely serve a community, not just the ones with the deepest pockets. But you have to give Google what it's looking for. Most independent operators have never had a partner who'd build that for them at a price they could afford. We're that partner.

Built for AI search, not just Google

Search is changing. Homeowners increasingly get answers from AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity before they ever see a list of blue links. The signals those systems use — clean structured data, real proof of work, locatable entities, trustworthy site architecture — are the same signals Google's local algorithm has been rewarding for years. We build for both at the same time, because they're built on the same foundation.

What that means in practice: schema markup on every page that should have it, real service-area content that names the neighborhoods you actually serve, internal linking that helps Google and AI crawlers understand your business as an entity, and a site fast enough and clean enough that it doesn't get filtered out before it's evaluated.

We can't promise rankings — nobody who's honest can. What we can promise is that the work we ship is structured to be ranked, by Google and by the AI systems Google is increasingly competing with.

What "you own everything" actually means

Baseline isn't a managed service hoping you forget to cancel. We don't host your site on our servers. We don't register your domain in our name. We don't build infrastructure that gets stuck to us. Your domain is yours, your GitHub repository is yours, your Netlify hosting account is yours. We get added as a collaborator. That's it.

If we do good work, you'll keep us around. If we don't, you walk away with the asset you paid for, still running, still ranking, still yours. That's the deal. And it's the deal that keeps us honest — because the only way we keep clients is by continuing to earn it.

How we keep it affordable

Two things make the math work:

• Operations discipline. Templates, automation, AI-assisted reporting, and a tight team mean we can deliver agency-grade SEO foundations without agency-grade overhead. We learned to operate this way at the previous company. We just kept the discipline and dropped the markup.
• A small team, on purpose. No bloated account management layer between you and the people doing the work. The team that builds your site is the team that answers your emails. That's a feature, not a constraint.

Where we work

Headquartered in Arizona. Serving home service businesses across the United States — anywhere a local operator wants to be found by Google, by AI, and by the customers who haven't been able to find them yet.

Want to talk?

Easiest way is to book a 30-minute call. No sales pitch. We'll talk through your business, your goals, and whether what we do is actually a fit for where you are.